1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an image forming apparatus capable of changing partitions of a storage unit, a control method therefor, and a storage medium storing a program for executing the control method.
2. Description of the Related Art
In an information processing apparatus, e.g., in an image forming apparatus such as a multi-function peripheral, a general-purpose operating system (OS) such as Linux (registered trademark) is generally used.
To this end, system software including the general-purpose OS is placed on a file system created on a nonvolatile memory, and the nonvolatile memory is used as a startup disk to start up the image forming apparatus.
The nonvolatile memory is partitioned in some cases. File systems are provided for respective partitions, and firmware files (such as OS), system data, and user data are placed on different partitions. Files and data placed on respective partitions do not interfere with one another, and even if user data is over capacity, user data overflow does not interfere with a system data area. This makes it possible to avoid an inconvenience that the image forming apparatus becomes unable to start up due to the user data overflow.
A partition configuration (the number of partitions and sizes of respective partitions) decided in software configuration design is sometimes subsequently changed to eliminate problems or to expand functions. However, when a nonvolatile memory stored with an OS for partition change is subjected to a partition change, the OS randomly accesses to its own file system. As a result, an OS mismatch is caused and the OS becomes inoperable.
In, e.g., Japanese Laid-open Patent Publication No. H9-16337, a partition change method has been proposed, in which partitions of a storage unit to be subjected to a partition change are changed by means of a system for partition change that is stored in another storage unit other than the storage unit subjected to partition change. With this proposal, however, in order to change partitions of a nonvolatile memory, it is necessary to prepare another nonvolatile memory stored with a system for partition change, posing a problem of cost-up.